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By Debbie Schlussel
In the spirit of Laurie David’s (and Sheryl Crow’s) insistence that we limit our toilet paper usage to one-square per visit, I bring you dumb environmental activist recommendations and experiments of the week:
* Julia Roberts stirring toilet-soup made of used diapers:
In order to promote her soon-to-be-released likely flop, “Charlie Wilson’s War” (which denounces our involvement with the Afghanistan Mujahideen against the Soviets), Julia Roberts got USA Today to do a gushing piece, today–“Julia Roberts: The Greening of a Superstar.” In it, Ms. Roberts tells us how she contributes less to the world’s garbage:

“We make a lot of garbage. How can we make less garbage? This is our plight. I use Seventh Generation (chlorine-free, non-toxic) diapers for Finn and Hazel, and then I was turned on to the (plastic-free, flushable) gDiapers” for Henry. “It is flushable, but you’ve got to stir that thing! If you don’t really break it all the way up, it doesn’t go all the way down,” advises the multimillion-dollar leading lady.

Um, who really believes this prima donna is running to her bathroom every time one of her three young kiddies makes a doody and is stirring diapers in her toilet until they break up into pieces? If anyone is actually doing this–and I highly doubt it–it’s a personal assistant or her servant-husband.
Stirring diapers in a toilet bowl? You keep doing that, Julia. But no thanks.
Question: Since there’s lots of garbage created, each time they eat–much less make a move–on movie sets, did Julia Roberts stir the set garbage in her toilet . . . “to break it up” and make less garbage?
You keep lecturing us little people, “Pretty Woman.”
Oh, and don’t forget: This is the same woman who in 2000 said:

Republican falls between Reptile and Repugnant in the dictionary.

FYI, Roberts falls between Roach and Rodent in the dictionary.
* “Don’t flush if it’s yellow“:
Fans at Saturday’s University of Georgia homecoming game were asked not to flush the toilet . . . if it was #1 they were releasing. More info than I needed, but the slogan, “Don’t flush if it’s yellow,” was posted on signs in bathrooms all over the stadium, in an effort to conserve water.
Not really a new concept, since passengers were forced to do the same on the planes that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked in 1970. You don’t exactly want to have to behave like hostage of Islamic terrorists when you’re at a football game.
Gee, I’ll bet the smell in there was just lovely. Gee, I have an idea for a new perfume: “Eau d’Hillary.”
* NBC Sports goes dark for a few minutes, expects you to go dark for a lifetime:
Last night, during the last minute of the kickoff show for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” broadcast and during its Half-time and Post-game shows, the studio went dark to do its part for the Green movement. Yup, I love watching my sporting events with 25% of normal visibility, too. Thrilling. NBC Sports says this is an attempt to get us to turn out our lights, too. Hey, NBC, I’ll happily do that, so long as you do it the entire season, for the entire show, on all of your television shows, instead of as a few-minute BS publicity stunt. What’s good for the goose, is good for NBC, right?:

NBC’s studio show will deliberately go dark for the last minute of the show ‚Äî before fully lit coverage of Dallas-Philadelphia kicks off at about 8:15 p.m. ET ‚Äî and stay dark during the halftime and postgame studio shows.
“We’re thinking of having Cris Collinsworth wear a miner’s helmet with a light,” says show producer Michael Weisman, seemingly serious. “And have candles. Or maybe Glow Sticks.”
Weisman knows how this all sounds. “We’re opening ourselves up for ridicule and sarcasm,” he says. “It might be perceived as a stunt. But with 20 million people watching, some might say, ‘Let’s go turn out the lights in rooms we’re not using.’ “
Which is not something you’d expect NBC parent General Electric‚Äî founded by light bulb creator Thomas Edison – to be advocating.
But starting at 8 p.m. ET Sunday, NBC and its various cable channels begin a week of “green-themed” programming, weaving in environmental angles to all its shows.
To address that NBC “edict,” Weisman says, FNA will show satellite shots of U.S. cities “to show all that electricity being used,” turn its onscreen logos green and include Bob Costas talking to Matt Lauer, who’ll be near the north pole to report for NBC’s Today show next week. Says FNA analyst Jerome “The Bus” Bettis: “This week, I’m the hybrid bus.”

14 Responses

Nobody is prepared to face the truth, that overpopulation is the problem for everything, and that White Western civilization provides the model to “save the planet”, by having small, affluent families instead of large, poor ones. Whitey has the answer, but people are too chicken to admit it.

Steve,
you are exactly right. One thing I could never understand in my various travels is how we provide a successful template for world civilization, yet 3rd worlders will not follow it on principal. One of the main themes I learned on my travels to Africa for work before I returned to law school was “We are Africans – we don’t need the white man to tell us how to do things.” “We don’t need to follow the colonialist model”, and other such nonsense. We provide a successful template for these countries, yet they refuse to follow it out of misplaced cultural pride, and continue to live in 3rd world rathole conditions while the plainly obvious answer to their troubles stares them right in the face.

NBC Sports:
Even the sports caster made fun of it. I wonder how much energy it took to shut everything down like that, and then get everything back up and running again? It takes a lot of energy to heat up and run those studio lights, so you might as well just leave them on.
Keith Olbermann:
Stick to what you do best, Olby. Sports is your game. As a political pundit your a big foolish goof.
Julia Roberts:
Shut up and smile. You’re making a fool of yourself.

Getting the disposable diapers to break up isn’t difficult. However, the absorptive gel within them makes those pieces of diaper clump together, absorb water to expand in size, and block pipes. If the blockage is not snaked out or dissolved quickly, the gel will solidify at the clog. This makes snaking a necessity, and sometimes snaking will not work and the pipes must be jetted.
So give Julia Roberts next week’s award as well. Many people listening to her advice will pay for following it.
chsw

Atlanta is running out of water, but these liberal entertainers want to keep bringing in 3rd world peasants with huge families, to “do the jobs Americans won’t do”, I guess to help build infrastructure for all the new people! Then they wonder why our roads are crowded, cities are polluted, and resources are dwindling. They won’t be happy till there are a billion people in the US and we’re all living in the 3rd world.
I heard Haiti was completely denuded of forests. So is China, and their big rivers are almost dead and drying up. We have to stop growing and paving everything, and a lot of people need to be told to stop having so many kids, especially when they are uneducated and can’t even feed themselves. But these stupid liberals want to see how many of them they can bring to the US to have 7 or 8 kids.

There is a balance that needs to be struck between use and abuse in most human activities. Our use of resources marks the record of an advanced and sophisticated civilization in a new century in a world where billions still subsist on $1 a day. This contrast can be viewed as a record of accomplishment just as easily as a record of waste. I suggest it is the politics of the individual that determines which side one sees: accomplishment or waste. Frequently neglected is that Western sophistication allows the luxury of examining issues such as conservation and environmental sensitivity, perspectives that would be unthinkable in cultures where survival is a daily issue. I would suggest that Western sophistication allows the unthinkable: the conversion of food such as corn into fuels to propel vehicles rather than to feed people or livestock. This is perhaps one pardox of the “greenies”–do not pump oil (a resource people do not eat), but convert corn or soybeans to feed engines, not people. The world is a strange and interesting place.

I have a novel idea. What doesn’t Julia Roberts just buy cloth diapers as mothers did for the past century? One simply has a diaper pail and throws the soiled diapers in the washing machine, bleaches them, and presto, the baby is more comfortable having cloth next to their skin rather than wearing a big Kotex. Being the grandmother of four grandchildren, I see the huge amount of money wasted buying diapers weekly not to mention the mounds of soiled diapers in the trash. I’m not going to worry about my amount of trash until todays mothers stop polluting land fills with millions of plastic diapers. More trouble? Yes, but can’t they do it for Mother Earth? An added benefit is both mother and child are anxious for the kid to be potty trained!

I am an african and i am saddened at the narrow mindedness of Yiddish Steel and JasonBourne81. If you read your history you will find that western ceconomies were built on the back of slavery and colonializm. Western economies continue to thrive because it can dictate the price of raw materials,it keeps Africa in debt and if you look at AID budgets carefully you will find that over 50 percent of AID actually returns to the west in one form or another.
While Africans are not innocent in all the bad things that have happened to them there is no civilization that has not gone through civil wars and abject poverty and we don’t have to look very far back in history to find evidence of this even in the west. Where would the west be if it couldn’t exploit cheap labor in Asia and locate polluting factories in third would countries so your children would live the comfortable lives they enjoy today?
What many forget is that many African countries have only been politically independent for less than a generation and are far from economically independent even now! I wonder where America was 40 years after the British left did you have 2.5 kids and drive SUVs?
The answer is more complex than you think and it takes time, we have much to learn from the west but we also have much to teach!

Great column, Debbie. NBC just proved that they are as dim as their studios.
Roseheb,
Africa’s problem is that they do not have a strong religious and moral base. It took time for the US and the UK to abolish slavery, but they did it without world opinion and sanctions. It was their moral religious base that caused the change in the first place. Was it soon enough? Obviously not. However, the change came from within and not from outside influences.
African leaders receive large sums of foreign aid which they keep for themselves. Unlike the Western countries, they did not look at the poor and disadvantaged as persons to be protected, but as persons to keep under subjection. No country is perfect, and never will be. Yet, if African countries do not make the SUGGESTED changes, they will NEVER achieve the economic development of their Western counterparts.
As for your rhetorical question, Americans struggled against odds, but with freedom from tyranny from their own leaders, we succeeded.
Yes, we have much to teach, but what do you have to teach us? I’d like to know.